


It's just a dream, Strider

by Princely_Sheep



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-25
Updated: 2012-03-25
Packaged: 2017-11-02 12:15:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/368883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Princely_Sheep/pseuds/Princely_Sheep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I am not crazy for the love of god, this is just a dream. A dream that I just haven't woken up from yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's just a dream, Strider

**Author's Note:**

> Diversion fics are great okay!!  
> This started off as a sort of homage to the 'unreliable narrator' device used in certain pieces of literature, but then it deviated a lot and now it's something entirely different???? I edited this at three in the morning so fingers crossed I'm not missing anything haha.

You know those memories you have that are so damn colorful you just can’t take ‘it’s not true’ for an answer? Yeah, well, I have one of those. Stop shaking your head and listen, and for the love of god if I hear you call me crazy I will rip this clock apart and impale you with the pendulum. What clock you ask? There’s a clock in here somewhere, there’s always a clock stowed away somewhere. Especially in asylums, you know, because those ( _tick tock tick tock)_ noises drive the patients just a bit more insane than before and the doctors get the biggest fucking thrill from it. Irony at its finest, I’d say, and Bro would be proud to hear that. Speaking of Bro.

Something is weird.

Not weird as in John’s retarded buckteeth weird, but weird as in ‘I’m going to freak Dave out and not wear my shades or talk about puppets or find the very notion of having swords in the fridge crazy and accuse Dave of being insane’ weird which is, you know, not cool at all. I mean who even does that to their little bro that’s kind of perverse even for him and it’s starting to freak me out which is just the funniest fucking thing. He’s freaking me out, and he says I’m freaking him out. Mutual freaking out between bros is not cool either and if this doesn’t get resolved soon I am seriously going to go on a clock-breaking rampage and I will find the largest pendulum available to ram down his throat until he stops freaking out.

Ugh, whatever, just thinking about Bro is starting to give me an ulcer. I know you’re here because you want to know why I landed in this crazy house and I guess I’m pretty much obliged to tell you a few things about my fucked up life at least, because you’ll believe what I have to say and having somebody who agrees with me is just the peachiest thing.

Then there’s Rose who’s apparently my sister through some weird ectobiology BS that I can’t take time to comprehend. She enjoys pulling complete Freudian bullshit on me but she likes to call it psychoanalysis (and I’m sure she wouldn’t know what psychoanalysis was if it did fucking somersaults in front of her face with its analytical dong flapping around). She’s an avid writer of fucked up wizard porn and she enjoys knitting or something. I’m also pretty sure she has this thing for cats. I think.

Lastly there’s Jade who’s on some remote island in the goddamn Pacific with a monster of a dog she calls Bec. I’m pretty sure that that dog feasts on nothing but irradiated steak. What’s with that look? Irradiated steak is a fucking thing alright, all glowing green and creepy as fuck and if you don’t believe that then oh well, when hordes of Bec puppies come lunging at your ass for food and you don’t know what to give them don’t blame me.

Okay, fuck, this train just got derailed fast. Whatever, getting back on track now.

So there’s this game called Sburb and we figured we might as well play it, considering the fact that we don’t have anything better to do. You know, we thought it’d be a regular computer game and we’d beat it in no time but that wasn’t the case because that game destroyed the world. Yep, sent meteors on a crash course to earth and only our homes got spared. Can you imagine that? Lying around like a useless sack of shit at your place and suddenly you look out the window to see a black void and nothing else? It almost made me miss Texas. Almost.

Some shit happened after that, I don’t know, of us getting used to the game and after that I’m in a place called the Land of Heat and Clockwork, or LOHAC if you’re short on speaking (but why would you ever be short on speaking that’s just fucking retarded.)

It’s called Heat and Clockwork for a reason, and one of those reasons is because it’s hot as hell. I’m not talking bathing in a pot of lava hot, I’m talking the opposite of the ninth circle of hell hot. Don’t tell bro I said this, but every time I think about that place I start to sweat. He thinks I’m crazy already; I don’t want him to think I’m getting increasingly delusional. Fuck, I’m sweating now, turn around and open up that window. What’s with that look? I’m not going to jump out of it, calm down. There’s some metal caging outside of it if it makes you feel better about ensuring that I’m not going to splatter my brains all over the pavement down there. Now where were we? Yeah, that’s right. The Clockwork part was pretty obscure but if you listened closely you could hear that annoying sound, you know the one. _Tick tock, tick tock,_ all soft and haunting and torturing, it’s so annoying; I just wanted it to stop.

But it never did, and it still hasn’t stopped (so maybe I am going a little crazy).

Remembering everything is hard and it usually all blurs together for some reason so I don’t really care what happened for a while after I entered LOHAC. I think I met Hephaestus and oh my god stop giving me that look Hephaestus is _real_ okay fuck you.

Let me tell you about the other characters in this fucked up story. There are these aliens called trolls and they have horns like candy corn that came out of the factory wrong. All different shapes and sizes and whirling like nobody’s goddamn business, but they were pretty cool. They had grey skin and different blood colors like teal and indigo and jade green and they were like, six.

Some of these trolls talked to us a lot, especially Terezi and Karkat. Terezi is blind but she gets around on smell and taste; her slobber was on all of her shit and it was disgusting, but you got used to it after a while. Karkat was this loudmouth who did not understand the concept of shutting the fuck up; I mean seriously, he had to stop breathing to stop talking once. He was good at romance apparently but he pulled some freaky shit on me once or twice while we were on that asteroid together.

Ugh, and don’t even get me started on their quadrants. Trolls have these weird ass relationship things based off of hearts and shit that they put on grids (and you know what while I’m at it fuck squares and diamonds and n-drangles) and there are four separate relationship statuses. I can’t recall the names all too clearly but they sound kinda funny I remember. There are ‘mate sprits’, ‘moi-rails’, ‘aus-piss-tices, and ‘kiss-me-sees’. I’m not getting into any details because fuck if I understand any of it, but believe me when I say troll relationships don’t mean jack shit to us humans.

We spent three years on an asteroid with some of those trolls, you know. At least I think it was three years; when you’re spending that much time on a piece of moving rock your sense of time starts to wane (ironic, isn’t it? Being the Knight of Time isn’t all it’s cracked up to be) except that goddamned noise. _Tick tock, tick tock,_ this clock ain’t stopping anytime soon fucker so you’d better get used to it.

The part that sucked was that I never did get to see John or Jade. I’m not going to lie; I was really looking forward to meeting them. John and Jade would have cheered everybody up so much, maybe even Karkat too, and our lives would have been cooler on that asteroid. Kanaya and Rose, even Terezi, were thinking about throwing some crazy ass intergalactic fete for them when we met up and it would have been pretty cool.

… _How_ did I end up here you ask? Well. That’s the thing. None of us went to sleep on that asteroid much because of the potential threat of being plagued by tentacle monsters and other weird shit, and all that horribly bad coffee we had kept us awake. But…coffee can’t keep us awake forever, you know. We may have been saving the world but we were just (kids, we were just a group of kids playing a fucked up game) human. And one day or night or whatever, I just sat down. That was it; harmless, isn’t it? But then it came. _(Tick tock, tick tock)_ That sound grew louder and I got tired, really tired, so I closed my eyes a little. ( _Tick tock_ ) I alchemized a pillow, okay? It wasn’t a big deal; I was just going to rest my head on it for a little while. ( _Tick tock)_ But then I couldn’t think straight anymore, and I thought I was going to go insane. I thought I was losing my mind after being away from home so much and then I started missing fucking _Texas_ , but thinking about home wouldn’t stop my eyes from growing heavy, the loud ticking ( _tick tock_ ) continuing with nobody around. ( _Tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock)_ I didn’t know what to do. I thought I was dying. I was aware, but I couldn’t move. I was useless…again.

Tick.

Tock.

And just like that, I woke up, but I wasn’t on that cold asteroid and I wasn’t in those comfortable god tier pajamas. I was in my room wearing an oversized starchy shirt and Bro was hovering over me _without his shades_ and he had this worried look in his eyes that made me want to puke; I felt like a little fucking kid when he did that and it was so unnatural. He asked me what was wrong, and I freaked. I told him he was supposed to be dead, that I was supposed to be on an asteroid, and that I was with Rose and we were both supposed to be meeting John and Jade. He looked at me like I ripped Lil’ Cal’s head off (and I would do that, I definitely would do that because fuck that puppet it’s creepy as shit) and of course when I asked him about that puppet’s whereabouts he told me he didn’t have a puppet, that he never had a puppet and he will never ever buy something as creepy and useless as that.

Bro got the audacity to tell me that I had no friends online named John, Jade or Rose, hell, that I really didn’t go on the computer that often and he even told me that aliens weren’t real. I didn’t have a sister and I was never on some asteroid, just here in busy old Texas living an average life with a not-dead guardian.

No, I didn’t believe a word he was saying. But that made it worse, and when I told him to stop dicking around he said I may have hit my head or something; told me he’d be taking me to a doctor. A fucking doctor when I’m (sufferingdelusionalhyperventilating) perfectly fine.

But we didn’t go to a doctor, we came here, and my bro _fucking betrayed me_. Labeled me a loony and tossed me in the bin and that was that (and now I’m not fine, how could you do that _why would you do that_ you fucking prick). He said he’d visit but I don’t believe that horseshit. I can’t believe this, this isn’t happening and I’m sure of that, so I’m waiting to wake up from this nightmare. ( _Tick tock, tick tock)_ Those fingers on the clock aren’t moving fast enough, though. So I’m stuck here twiddling my fucking fingers and telling you all of this irrelevant shit; it’s irrelevant because you don’t even exist. This is just a figment of my imagination and I’m not giving in. So I’ll wait, and soon Rose will be shaking me awake, asking me why the hell did I go to sleep, and she’ll give me a cup of shitty coffee to drink.

Tick.

Tock.

Tick…tock.

**____________________________________________________________**

**  
**

\-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] began trolling turntechGodhead [TG] \--

CG: STRIDER.

CG: WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU? WE’VE ALL BEEN WORRIED.

CG: YES, ‘ALL’, AS IN INCLUDING ME, SO GO AHEAD AND RUB IT IN WHILE YOU CAN YOU BLUBBERING YELLOW-HEADED FUCK. ‘HAHA, KARKAT’S BEEN WORRIED!! THIS IS FUCKING PRICELESS.’

TG: whoa what

TG: shit vantas i had the weirdest dream

CG: SPARE ME YOUR FUCKING HORRORTERROR TRIP AND COME TO THE LAB SO WE CAN TALK ABOUT IMPORTANT SHIT.

TG: no see thats the thing it wasnt a horrorterror trip it was an honest to god dream

TG: and it was the weirdest dream ever

TG: i dreamed that none of this ever happened

TG: no sburb or meeting you guys and bro was not dead and it just

TG: seemed so real

TG: but i was in an asylum and im not crazy

TG: but i felt crazy and

TG: …

CG: WELL TELL ME THIS, STRIDER.

TG: what is it

CG: TROLL ZHUANG DREAMT HE WAS A BUTTERFLY.

CG: BUT THEN HE WOKE UP AND HE BEGAN TO WONDER:

CG:  WAS HE TROLL ZHUANG, WHO HAD DREAMT HE WAS A BUTTERFLY, OR WAS HE A BUTTERFLY DREAMING THAT HE WAS TROLL ZHUANG?

TG: what

TG: what the fuck are you trying to say

TG: this isnt funny

TG: like was the purpose of that question to freak me out

TG: because congratufuckinglations vantas you have successfully freaked me out

TG: dude where are you

TG: youd better respond or else

\-- carcinoGeneticist [CG] ceased trolling turntechGodhead [TG] \--

TG: …

____________________________________________________________

 

It’s been months and I still haven’t woken up.


End file.
